


and i begin to fade

by mercurybard



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Community: au_bingo, F/M, Underage Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-11-26
Updated: 2010-11-26
Packaged: 2017-10-13 09:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 808
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/135750
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mercurybard/pseuds/mercurybard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This, she supposes, is what being dead is really about--being numb.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and i begin to fade

**Author's Note:**

> Push belongs to people who ain't me.

Pop. Pop.

Two bullets from the Chinese Watcher's dainty gun and Cassie is looking down at her own very still body as blood pools around it.

She should be crying, she thinks as she watches Pop Girl turn and walk away with a dull click of heels on the non-insulated floor. She should be screaming.

But all she feels is numb. This, she supposes, is what being dead is really about--being numb.

It's two days before her blood seeps through the floorboards and leaves a mysterious rusty stain on the ceiling of the little grocery downstairs. Another two before the shopkeeper decides to investigate and finds her body in the back corner of the stockroom by the cartons of Lucky Tiger-brand chopsticks.

(She becomes something of an urban legend after that--the girl with the golden hair mysteriously murdered. Teenagers tell stories about how she haunts the shop and about how the storekeeper and his entire family died horrible deaths as her spirit exacted her revenge. Not true, of course--the shopkeeper finally grew tired of peoples’ suspicion that he'd been the one to murder her and moved his family to a different neighborhood--but the stories persisted.)

She doesn't haunt the store. Instead, she haunts the fuck out of Nick. He becomes frantic when she doesn't come find them after it is all said and done. (She watched his final showdown with Kira and Carver and cheered when he faked his death and the Division agents just walked away.) Pinky tries to convince him that she was smart and got out--took the uncertain road and kept walking until she reached safety--but Nick knows better, she thinks as she drifts along beside him.

Then her body is discovered, and it takes all of Emily's practicality and Hook Waters' ruthless survival instincts to keep Nick from stepping forward and claiming it. It would be too suspicious, the local cops all too eager to find an easy suspect and close the case. They'd blame Nick the foreigner, and Cassie doesn't want that. So the night they cremate her, Hook slips a sedative into Nick's beer and Cassie stands vigil at his bedside when he collapses in a drunken stupor. The day they put her ashes into a box and slip it into the racks of unclaimed dead at the local precinct, she climbs onto the narrow hotel bed and lies down beside him.

Nick's awake, but his eyes are open and there might as well be no one home as he stares at the wallpaper. His head has to be throbbing from the roofie and all the alcohol he'd put away the night before. Maybe that's why he's breathing so carefully. Cassie scootches as close as she can and wraps her transparent arms around him. It shouldn't do anything--nothing she's done has had any effect on the living world (she ran screaming down a bustling Hong Kong street, passing right through person after person, and none of them so much as twitched as she slid through them)--but he shivers violently as her hand slides over his bare arm.

Cassie freezes. "Nick?" she asks. She meant to speak in a normal tone, but all that comes out is a tentative whisper.

He groans, and when she reaches her hand up to touch his face, she can feel tears under her fingertips, smooth and cold.

"Nick...Nick...it's not your fault," she mumbles into the back of his shoulder.

But he can't hear her. So Cassie tries to hold him as he cries, taking all the blame for her death on himself because it was his master plan, even though her death wasn't his fault. It really wasn't. She had drawn the tiger more times than she could count and ran toward it anyway. Her touch leaves him wracked with shivers, but she holds on through it all, unwilling to let him slide away in this shitty hotel room with peeling wallpaper and light fixtures that buzz slightly when she walks underneath them.

It's time to go, she thinks when he cries himself out. Tenderly, she presses a kiss to the smooth flesh behind his ear and slides off the bed, out of the room.

(Months later, a flight attendant Nick hooks up with in Beijing will comment on the tattoo behind his ear. "The lips are a little gay, honey," she says but plants a kiss of her own over them.

Nick is supremely confused even when she manages to angle his head and a compact to let him see the mark behind his left ear in the bathroom mirror. If it's a tattoo he picked up while drunk, he's never seen one like it before--shiny and silver like an old scar in the shape of a lip print. Like the ghost of a kiss.)


End file.
